The minivan is back, and it's kind of cool

A big part of the minivan market in the United States is the Chrysler Pacifica.

Photo: A.J. Mueller

Mom-jeans are stylish again, Pokemon is ubiquitous, and the minivan is having a major moment. As the old saying goes: Those who fail to learn from the 1990s are doomed to repeat them.

Minivan sales in the U.S. are up 21 percent so far this year, outmatching every class of vehicle except the midsize pickup. And though the bloated kid-carrier has yet to match its heyday, U.S. drivers are on pace to buy more than 600,000 of them this year for the first time in almost a decade. If the current pace holds, more people will purchase these soccer practice-pods than subcompact cars such as the Honda Fit or such entry-level luxury cars as the BMW 3 series.

Its renaissance was hard to see coming. Until recently, the minivan looked as though it were headed for the historical scrap heap, along with the pickup car and the Volkswagen diesel.

The antagonist? An army of SUVs. Minivan sales in the U.S. peaked in 2000 at about 1.4 million vehicles. Two years later, Americans bought more than 3 million SUVs for the first time. These vehicles were big, tall, and infinitely cooler. Nowadays there are roughly 100 SUVs to choose from in the U.S.-from a $20,000 version that looks like a swollen sedan to a $100,000 land yacht. Meanwhile, there are six minivans. The ratio isn't a coincidence: When it comes to style, SUVs are considered the vehicular equivalent of a leather jacket, while minivans are a pair of cargo shorts.

"It got this reputation for being very uncool," said Michelle Krebs, a senior analyst at AutoTrader. "It was the whole soccer-mom thing."

The sacrifice with SUVs, of course, is convenience. They generally aren't as low as minivans, so toddlers have to clamber into them like tree-forts. The doors swing, rather than slide. And while many of these big rigs have three rows of seats, they come at the expense of space. Even the massive Cadillac Escalade has only 94 cubic feet of open real estate in the back, about one-third less than a current minivan.

And children are a larger consideration in car-buying these days. Although birth rates in the U.S. have been declining, the total number of babies has stayed relatively high thanks to overall population growth. The number of newborns in the U.S. peaked in 2007, so right about now, those kids are approaching their 10th birthday. Not only are they going to soccer practice, but many of them have siblings, too. The number of U.S. households with at least four people is at an all-time high.

Also, in April, the all-new Chrysler Pacifica coasted into the market on a tide of gushing reviews.

"They did an extremely good job with this vehicle," Krebs said. "I don't think the segment will ever be what it used to be, but this certainly breathed new life into it."